9/11 – Five Years Later

“Did you hear…”

People always celebrate five year marks. Five years at a job, five years after a family member dies, five years after graduation, five years of dating, five years of marriage. Five years seems to be a magical time period.

“About what?”

Five years is a long time. Relationships are made and ended, jobs gained and lost, children grow older, and people change. Five years is a long time to grieve, to reflect, to hold on to something long since past.

“A plane hit the World Trade Center…”

Five years ago, I was fresh out of college, working my first real job. I had the world by the balls. I was engaged to be married, living on my own, I was going places. And in one day, I lost my innocence.

Our world ended that day, to give rise to a different, darker world. We’d dealt with terrorism before. It always came in the guise of American crazy men. The Unabomber, Timothy McVeigh. But never could any outside forces hurt us. We were AMERICA. We were the good guys, right?

Standing here now, five years down the road, I don’t feel any safer and I find myself more inclined to not trust the government. The measures they have taken in the name of safety, the systemic removal of certain rights… 9/11 became to me what Watergate was to my mother… A removal of the blinders.

I was my oldest step-daughter’s age when the first Gulf War began. The last year I remember feeling blindly confident in our government was in 4th grade. I voted in my faux election at school, and voted for Papa Bush because: “My mommy is a republican and she voted for him.”

I found out in high school that my mother NEVER voted republican. My fourth grade vote was built on a lie.

We’ve spent five years grabbing onto the horror we all felt in a common masochistic desire to feel alive, using the phrase: “Never Forget”. Because if we forget, we’ll be doomed to repeat it. GWB said tonight that our freedom scared those in favor of tyrrany, and the measure we have put in place to protect the country have only enhanced our freedom.

He said the war in Iraq was a necessity of the war on terror because “Saddam was a threat we could not ignore.”

Now we have Saddam, but where is the person actually responsible for these atrocities? Why have we lost nearly the same number of soldiers in a country we don’t belong in as we lost five years ago? What is the lesson here?

What do I see? I see in five years, we haven’t learned anything but to feed on the pain and foster the fear the attack instilled. We haven’t learned to move on and celebrate the dawning of the new day. The towers are gone, the rubble has been cleared, but we still live in their dark shadow, fostered by our own government. Fear is a powerful motivator, an amazing tool for unification, but the time for fear has passed.

Five years ago, I stood in shock, too horrified for tears as the buildings collapsed. I relived some of that this weekend and find myself on the other side, heart in my throat and looking at where we are now. We have allowed ourselves to wallow in the anguish for far too long. The time for fear and its tactics has passed, we have given the terrorists enough of our pain to feast on. Tomorrow is a new day. And I, for one, intend to move on.